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We’ve reached the tipping point on climate change

“Canadians are reasonable,” former prime minister Jean Chretien once advised Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna. “He was a good mentor for me,” she says. “Soyez raisonnable!” was his advice, and it’s working.

Despite the Gang of Three — the primitive alliance of Ontario’s Doug Ford, Alberta’s hard-right gadfly Jason Kenney, and galumphing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer opposing federal carbon pricing — I asked McKenna at a Monday speech at the University of Toronto if all Canadians would ever reach a tipping point on recognizing climate change and uniting as a nation to fight it.

Would they come to agree that a fairly predictable climate was now giving us weather that could best be described as hyperactive turned manic turned frenetic? It veers from sodden to baking hot, then violently stormy, fiery, flooded and worse.

McKenna says the tipping point is already happening. She is calm, she is reasonable. “There’s been so much attention at the national level because of the Paris Agreement … but cities don’t have the luxury of pretending climate change isn’t real.”

And businesses “just from a risk perspective have to accept climate change and plan for it.” She talked to Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney in Washington this week and he called climate prep “a $26-trillion opportunity.” Wall Street is thrilled as Trump is not.

The third force is citizens. “Last summer people literally died,” says McKenna referring to the Quebec heat catastrophe. She mentions people with homes on flood plains, the terrible fires in B.C., and the damage to the tourist industry alone. “Most Canadians want climate action.”

It makes sense. For decades, climate change was too amorphous to grasp overall. As my basement floods, so will life disappear from the planet? It seemed implausible.

“The sense of the object always trembles — not that of the concept,” Roland Barthes wrote. A Guardian critic (writing, incidentally, on Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye)interprets this as “physical descriptions can resonate with us more clearly than ideas.”

We observe. Bit by bit, year by year, we grow worried. Then your oak comes crashing down in a windstorm, destroying the gabled roof and the neighbour’s garage, and smashing the dog flat. You loved the dog. The concept of climate change is suddenly real.

Ottawa, much like a Liberal version of the Canadian hit kids’ show Paw Patrol, is on the case. But as politicians like Ford confuse distracted voters with right-wing faux journalism, federal climate prep doesn’t get the close attention it deserves, not when Ford is declaring that’s everything’s just fine.

We can see that it’s not. Why else would he let Ontarians start drinking in restaurants at breakfast?

Ottawa is phasing out coal and investing in renewables, planning for 90 per cent clean energy by 2030, building public transit, retrofitting hospitals, schools and other buildings, pricing carbon and giving the money back to citizens, cutting plastic waste, mandating cleaner fuel standards, reducing methane emissions in the oil and gas sector, and setting aside money for climate change infrastructure.

It is also joining with other progressive nations on carbon-reduction measures, like helping poorer countries manage waste and stop plastic being dumped in oceans, and at the G7 helping set international standards for recycling plastic, so far adopted by 18 nations.

McKenna is saying that the understanding of the catastrophes we’ll encounter — and more importantly, our children will live with — could never have been approached only from the top. Just as the concept of men sexually brutalizing women in the workplace didn’t hit home until #MeToo, change, such as it is, resulted from hearing specific harassment stories from brave women, and seeing awful men sued, charged and jailed.

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Quebec rivers breached their banks in 2017 and again the following year? How many acres burned in northern B.C. in 2017 and again in 2018? Gorillas and walruses have lost habitats and they have nowhere to go? … What do you mean, Joe Biden sniffed your hair? What hair? Why?

The great question has now been answered. Lawyerlike, climate activists built their case. People listened. Politicians listened. We have tipped into understanding that the Anthropocene, the era of human influence on the planet, may come to an end.

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